Tuesday, June 24, 2008

JK Rowling Commencement address at Harvard (2008)

"President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers,members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only hasHarvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I'veexperienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made melose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths,squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world'sbest-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thoughtuntil I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker thatday was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflectingon her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns outthat I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enablesme to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you toabandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delightsof becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard'joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievablegoals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say toyou today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my owngraduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 yearsthat has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we aregathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided totalk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on thethreshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol thecrucial importance of imagination.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is aslightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she hasbecome. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance betweenthe ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected ofme.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to writenovels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverishedbackgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view thatmy overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could neverpay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted tostudy English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospectsatisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had myparents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditchedGerman and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics;they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Ofall subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put toname one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing thekeys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame myparents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming yourparents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are oldenough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, Icannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experiencepoverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, andI quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Povertyentails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousandpetty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your ownefforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, butpoverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, butfailure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university,where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, andfar too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations,and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and thatof my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted andwell-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent andintelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of theFates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyedan existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests thatyou are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by afear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, yourconception of failure might not be too far from the average person'sidea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutesfailure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria ifyou let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure,a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epicscale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I wasjobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modernBritain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me,and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usualstandard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun.That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there wasgoing to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy taleresolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a longtime, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failuremeant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending tomyself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to directall my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had Ireally succeeded at anything else, I might never have found thedetermination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. Iwas set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and Iwas still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had anold typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solidfoundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life isinevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something,unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived atall - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passingexaminations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could havelearned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and morediscipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friendswhose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacksmeans that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. Youwill never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships,until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift,for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me thanany qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-oldself that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not acheck-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV,are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and olderwho confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyondanyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you tosurvive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance ofimagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, butthat is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime storiesto my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broadersense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envisionthat which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention andinnovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whoseexperiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded HarryPotter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in thosebooks. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs.Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paidthe rent in my early 20s by working in the research department atAmnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggledout of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were riskingimprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them.I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent toAmnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony oftorture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I openedhandwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, ofkidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had beendisplaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had thetemerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to ouroffice included those who had come to give information, or to try andfind out what had happened to those they had been forced to leavebehind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no olderthan I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he hadendured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into avideo camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foottaller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the jobof escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this manwhose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisitecourtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridorand suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain andhorror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and theresearcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drinkfor the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news thatin retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime,his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded howincredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democraticallyelected government, where legal representation and a public trial werethe rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflicton their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to havenightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heardand read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at AmnestyInternational than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured orimprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. Thepower of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, andfrees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and securityare assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do notknow, and will never meet. My small participation in that process wasone of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn andunderstand, without having experienced. They can think themselves intoother people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that ismorally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, orcontrol, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They chooseto remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, nevertroubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than theyare. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they canclose their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch thempersonally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that Ido not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to livein narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and thatbrings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see moremonsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable realmonsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves,we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridordown which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I couldnot then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What weachieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times everyday of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection withthe outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply byexisting.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touchother people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work,the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, andunique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The greatmajority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The wayyou vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bringto bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. Thatis your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice onbehalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not onlywith the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability toimagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have youradvantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrateyour existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality youhave helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change theworld, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have thepower to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is somethingthat I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation dayhave been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, thepeople to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends whohave been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for DeathEaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by ourshared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course,by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that wouldbe exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. Andtomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine,you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when Ifled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, insearch of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, iswhat matters.

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

About Me

Visitas

Los pacientes me dicen

"Hope things are good with you - and as a minor comment, it's only looking back that I fully appreciate the effectiveness of your approach, and your ability to present me with no insight into your own beliefs, values or pre-conceptions, and therefore allowed me to present ANYTHING to you without the thought that you would be somehow "passing judgement" on my behaviour or thoughts"
S., 47, hombre.
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"I also wanted to mention that I did think about becoming a film editor quite a bit and read books about it and met some people from that business. I have not decided yet what I will do with my future professional life, but your idea of me becoming a film editor opened a whole new horizon with new possibilities I have not thought about before. I wanted to thank you for that.
Since January, I am also enrolled in a belly dancing class and I do enjoy it a lot. My husband not only bought me an introductory DVD for Christmas but also enrolled me in a class at the same time. So I kind of had to go but did not regret it. I even had the chance to sing a Nora Jones song together with my husband who played the guitar and it was good.
For all these little but somehow big things I wanted to thank you. Without the conversations with you, I would still think about these things and not have done them.
For now, I will move to LA, have another child but also explore the possibility of becoming a film editor more once we are in LA and other possibilities, too. I feel I made several significant steps forward with the help of your guidance. "
K. 32, woman.